love taught me to lie
by airbefore
Summary: Her dad takes her to the airport. He doesn't ask where Castle is and she doesn't offer. *Watershed post-ep*
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer:** All television shows, movies, books, and other copyrighted material referred to in this work, and the characters, settings, and events thereof, are the properties of their respective owners. As this work is an interpretation of the original material and not for-profit, it constitutes fair use. Reference to real persons, places, or events are made in a fictional context, and are not intended to be libelous, defamatory, or in any way factual.

_I wasn't going to write a post ep but this crawled into my head today and wouldn't get out so here we are. _

* * *

_Stones taught me to fly_

_Love taught me to lie_

_Life taught me to die_

_So it's not hard to fall_

_When you float like a cannonball_

_~Cannonball, Damien Rice_

Her dad takes her to the airport.

He doesn't ask where Castle is and she doesn't offer.

She doesn't even know. Hasn't seen him since he showed up at her door three days ago, alcohol on his breath and agony in his eyes. He'd stood in the threshold for a long moment, simply staring at her, before surging forward and taking her face in his hands, claiming her mouth in vicious kiss. A kiss that left her wet and aching in an instant, a kiss that blackened her mind and whited her vision, made her forget all the reasons why they shouldn't.

She let him press her up against the wall. Let him slide his leg between hers and pull at her clothes, hot palms dragging over her bare skin. Whimpered his name when he bit her neck and shoved his hand down the front of her pants, his thick fingers slicking into her in one fluid motion. She'd tried to block out the sound of the ragged words he breathed into her skin, _love_ and _Kate_ and _please_ stumbling off his tongue as he moved inside her, broke her apart.

He stopped them halfway across her living room, their chests bare and hands fumbling. _I can't_. _Not like this. _Pulling on his shirt, he kissed her one last time, his tongue painting the smoky taste of whiskey and regret across hers, and left without a word, the door closing with a quiet finality.

She spent the rest of the night on her couch, half-naked and sobbing.

He didn't come to the last minute going away party Lanie threw for her. She hadn't expected him to but still spent the entire night perched on a stool, watching the door, her stomach turning with every pick up line and proposition slurred into her ear. She wanted him to be there. Wanted to feel the warmth of his hand at the small of her back, the hot press of his lips on the side of her neck. Wanted him to show up and ask her again, the ring she had refused held tightly between two strong fingers.

She might have said yes.

* * *

Heat Wave sits unopened in her lap on the flight to DC. She touches it constantly, smoothing over the deep creases in the spine and attempting to flatten the dog eared corners of the cover. Tracing his name again and again, her ring finger too light. Empty. She can't open it. Can't bring herself to read his words, the words he wrote about her long before she accepted him as part of her life.

Long before she fell in love with him.

It's more than the dance. It's real, what they have. Had. She knew it when she said it, knew that she was turning a lie into a question in an effort to make it easier. To soften her chest and strengthen her fingers so she could rip out her own heart in order to chase her dreams. The guilt at not having done the same for him haunts her, her nails chipped from the jagged edges of his ribs and hands sticky with the phantom stains of his blood.

She wishes she had made him hate her.

Thinks she might have come close.

The plane glides to a stop and she tucks the book into her carry on, the front cover falling open in the loose pocket of her bag. She stares down at the two sentences on the dedication page, her heart hanging in her throat. Extraordinary. She's anything but. He knows that now.

She calls her dad on the way to her new apartment. Her eyes well when he tells her she's going to be great, that this is what she's meant to be doing. The right words from the wrong person. They talk until the cab stops in front of her building, the once white bricks stained brown with age and pollution. She climbs the two flights to the unfamiliar front door, holding her breath as she fits the key into the lock and twists the knob.

Her heart, her stupid and clumsy heart, stumbles when she finds the apartment empty, the air stale and dusty. In some insane, shadowy corner of her mind, she'd thought he might be here. Might be standing inside the furnished living room, a bottle of wine in his hand and a crooked smile flirting with his lips.

When she wakes up that night with his name on her tongue and her hands fisted in the sheets, she's grateful for the new surroundings. For the walls he's never touched, the doorways he's never filled, the rooms he's never roamed. Grateful she can wake up in a bed that's not drenched in his scent, not suffused with memories of them. Memories of the way their bodies fit together or how her name broke apart in his mouth when he shattered beneath her or how it felt to wake up in his embrace, warm and safe.

Whole.

* * *

Lanie calls her once a week. They talk about her job, the annoyances of learning to navigate a new city, how the boys are still whining about the amount of paperwork they have to do with her gone.

They never mention his name.

* * *

A truck stacked with boxes, all neatly labeled in her father's handwriting, arrives on the sixth Saturday. She lets them sit untouched in her living room for a week; she's not ready to have her things here. Not ready to see her books on the shelves and her pillows on the couch. Not ready to admit that this - this cold, sterile apartment - is her home.

He was supposed to be her home.

She finds the ring tucked into the bottom of a box of books. His books. Their books. Her hand shakes when she pulls out the little black box, the crushed velvet an unfamiliar texture against the pads of her fingers. The hinges crack loudly when she opens the lid and her breath catches hard in her chest. Diamonds sparkle in the sunlight, casting a refracted rainbow over the glossy covers, bouncing off the raised letters of his name.

There's no note. She digs through the box, shakes out every book. Nothing. He's a writer, he should have left a note. He has the words, not her. She never has. The ring goes into a box in the back of her closest, buried under a pile of sweat pants and thick winter socks.

A collection of things she won't need any time soon.

* * *

On Tuesdays, she calls her dad for their weekly talk. He opens with the same question every time.

_How are you, Katie?_

And every time, she lies.

_I'm fine._


	2. Chapter 2

He leaves her sitting on the swingset, the ring in his pocket and her quiet explanations echoing in his ears. She can't, she's taking the job, she's leaving, it's what's best for them both. He wanted to yell at her, throw back in her face the thing she's told him time and again, that it's not up to her, she doesn't get to decide what's best for him. But all he did was nod and stand, put his hands in his pockets and then walk away.

Anger simmers under the fresh layer of hurt. He's still pissed at her for the secrets and lies of omission and for taking them back to a place where he wishes like hell that love really was a switch. Because he would turn it off right now, would cast himself into the dark in order to stop feeling the arrythmic beat of his heart and the the warmth slowly leaking out of his body the further away from her he gets.

He gets drunk that night, a bottle sitting on his nightstand and the ring, her ring, hooked around his left pinky. Everything smells like her, the sheets and the pillows and the comforter all dripping with her scent. He strips the mattress bare at one am, balling the the sheets up and throwing them into the corner, the ring flying from his finger and pinging off the cold hardwood floor.

He sleeps fully clothed on the couch, the soft leather slick under his wet cheek.

* * *

He wishes he hadn't been drunk the last time he kissed her. Wishes there was no last time, that she'd slammed the door in his face instead of biting his lip and scratching her nails down his back. The soft sigh of his name on her lips haunts him, follows him as he moves from room to room, collecting all the pieces of her he finds scattered through his home.

The earrings she slipped into his pocket in the middle of dinner one night because they were making her ears hurt, the robe he bought for her that she only used twice before going back to stealing his, bottles of shampoo and lotion and her favorite shade of nail polish. He tosses it all into a box and shoves it in the closet in his guest room, unable to make himself throw it all out.

He finds the ring under the bed, glinting dimly in the shadows. It's tiny in his palm, the band delicate and the diamonds beautifully modest. It would have looked perfect on her long, slender finger. He slips the ring back into the soft nest of crushed velvet and puts the box in the nightstand on her side of the bed, tucking it into the dark corner at the back of the drawer, hoping he can forget it's there, can erase from his mind the look on her face when she said no, when she reached into his chest and tore out his heart.

* * *

Sometimes whiskey is the only thing that can wash the taste of her out of his mouth.

* * *

Lanie starts calling him after a few weeks. She leaves him messages he doesn't listen to, sends texts he doesn't read. He feels like an ass but he can't do it, can't talk to their friends and pretend that he's not broken and lost. That he doesn't wake up from dreams of her every night, doesn't sit on the bed with the ring box in his hand, not able to open it and unwilling to put it away. That he hasn't even started to let her go.

In a haze one night, he'd downloaded an app to track the time, to measure the weeks, the days, the minutes since she's been gone. He deleted it the next morning, his face burning with embarrassment, but he didn't need it anyway. He knows exactly how long it's been, how much time has passed since they were last in the same room, the same city.

He still has flashes of anger, the fury burning hot and fast in his chest, charing his lungs and blackening the gaping hole where his heart used to be. She lied and she hid things, she broke his trust and made him doubt everything he'd thought he knew about her, about them. She walked out of his life without looking back and he wants so badly to hate her but he can't. He can't because he knows she was right when she said it was too soon, when she told him that he was doing it to make a point, doing it because it was the only thing he could think of to keep her.

He can't hate her because he loves her. And if she showed up tomorrow, asking him to forgive her, to forget it all and be with her, to move to DC and spend the rest of his life standing by her side, he would do it. He would give her anything she asked for, anything at all.

He hates himself for that.

* * *

Jim Beckett calls him the at the end of June, says he's found a subletter for her apartment and will be packing up her things over the next few days. He doesn't ask for help, just says that if there's anything he wants or needs, he should come as soon as he can.

He forces himself out of bed the next morning, drags a comb through his hair and a razor over his cheeks. It doesn't matter what he looks like, he knows that. But a streak of pride still runs along his chest and he refuses to show up at her apartment looking like the drowning man he is.

Her father opens the door with a nod, his mouth pulled into a thin, serious line so much like hers that it knocks the wind out of his chest. He can't do this. It takes everything he has not to spin on the spot and run, run away as fast as he can. Run home, run to the Hamptons, run to her; he just wants to run.

His left foot itches when he steps over the threshold, heart slamming painfully against his ribs as he tries like hell not to think about the last time he was here. When he'd pushed her up against the wall and claimed her, trying to remind them both that what they had was real, undeniable. Essential.

Boxes litter the floor, some half-packed, some taped shut and neatly labeled. Most of her things are gone and his stomach turns as he takes in the empty shelves and the bare walls. He can't fathom this apartment being inhabited by anyone other than her; can't see another person padding around barefoot in the kitchen, doesn't want to think about someone else standing naked in her shower, won't let himself imagine how a stranger's laugh would sound echoing off the walls in her bedroom.

He finds an open box at the foot of the stairs, a row of neatly arranged spines stretching from one end of the cardboard to the other. The books he wrote before her, the books he wrote for her, books filled from front to back with the words she said saved her, words that touched her and made her feel. He wonders when his words lost that power.

She said she wanted him. Just him. And now less than a year later she's gone and he's left staring at the broken pieces, wondering what the hell went wrong. Trying to figure out why they weren't enough for her, why he wasn't enough. The question gnaws at him every day, refusing to be silenced by sleep or drowned by alcohol. He needs the answer but he knows he'll never get it.

Carefully, he leans over and slips the ring from his pocket, tucking it down into a dark corner of the box. He rearranges the books, certain that her father wouldn't approve, wouldn't allow him to do this, but he has to. He can't live with it anymore, can't keep pulling it out of the drawer every night and thinking about the things he lost, the things he'll never have. She made him a better man; made him want to be a man she could love, a man she could be proud of, a man she could spend her life with. He might not have been able to be that man but he bought the ring for her and she should have it.

Whether she wants the attached promises or not.

* * *

He finds a plane ticket on his desk two weeks later. JFK to Dulles, two-fifteen the next day. Non-refundable.

He looks up, sees his mother watching him knowingly from the open doorway.

_Go, Richard. _

He packs a bag that night.

* * *

_Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always appreciated. _


End file.
